Yesterday, Congressman Ed Markey’s (D-MA) Natural Resources Committee staff released a report called “Our Pain, Their Gain: Mountains Destroyed for Coal Shipped Overseas.” It outlines how coal exports from Appalachia have been growing over the past few years. And, quite surprisingly, how some of the companies in the region export up to 100 percent of the coal that they mine.

As the report details:

Coal exports have nearly doubled since 2009 to 107 million tons last year, now accounting for almost 12 percent of U.S. production. Three out of every four tons that are exported come from the Appalachian region.

While mountaintop removal mines are happy to sell to the highest foreign bidder, it’s the Appalachian people who are paying the steepest price for this coal that America no longer uses.

The use of coal in the United States is on the decline due to the rise of natural gas, a strong activist community, and new public health regulations making it difficult to keep old, dirty power plants open. But coal companies have seen exports as a way to continue growing. In fact, exporting coal is often more lucrative than selling it domestically.

Coal exports in other parts of the country are expected to increase, particularly from Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin. A number of companies like Peabody and Arch Coal are investing heavily in infrastructure like railways and new ports in the Pacific Northwest to ensure that this happens.

Let’s see. Land destroyed, water and people poisoned, miners lungs filled with coal-dust. Massive profits for the Bosses. Brother-that’s the ‘Real American Way’, or did you miss the last 200 odd years? A ‘win-win-win’ for the 1%. Talk of taking back ‘our’ country is foolish, naive and tragically ironic, because it never has been ‘the people’s’ country. Like every capitalist state it belongs to those who own it and follow the Golden Rule- ‘He who has the gold makes the rules’.

I agree that it’s systemic Chris but it works in the opposite direction, i.e. when an idealistic person is elected to a representative democracy, they find themselves in a system governed by inequality of status in which they must fight for their own interests. It isn’t long before self interest becomes the most visible characteristic and this can be taken to its extreme but logical limits as we see in the USA political system today.

It takes huge reserves of strength to overcome these dynamics and while some can manage it, most can’t. The failing becomes ubiquitous which is what leads people like Mulga to blame the people while it is the system and its underlying design principle that must be changed, ME

Such a sad commentary for American “justice”.The corporations reap the profits the people are left with a ripped up land,and polluted rivers.America needs more clean renewable energy.America needs more jobs America needs more justice.

We’re getting off of coal because coal is such a climate change gas disaster. So we sell it to China at a pittance, and then they send the released carbon dioxide right back to us. Isn’t politics wonderful!

Exporting coal may be the fatal “loophole” through which poisons flow. A carbon tax may, if it ever passes our Congress, divert investment to green energy. BUT….Even a carbon tax, unless it is levied before export, may not touch coal emissions for exported coal.

It may be only when Fl, NY, etc. are under water, the midwest a dust bowl, and most forests gone that there will be a confluence of corporate will and political will. I say corporate will, not political will. Why?? Even if 90% of the public demands mitigation legislation, there is no guarantee the pols would give a damn.